


Sleepless

by ReaperShadCat



Category: Danny Phantom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-27
Updated: 2012-12-27
Packaged: 2017-11-22 16:16:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/611758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ReaperShadCat/pseuds/ReaperShadCat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Danny lies awake at night, thinking about things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sleepless

It was three in the morning, but Danny Fenton couldn't sleep.

He was mesmerized by himself, and he realized he was afraid. He listened to the soft noises that broke the night's silence - a soft rush of air as he drew it into his lungs, and a dull thudding from deep within his chest. Those things meant he was alive, but he realized that he could stop them. In a matter of seconds, in a short bath of light, in a quick pass through blinding white halos, they stopped.

He could breathe if he wanted to, but when he wasn't thinking about it, he didn't. He had no heartbeat.

He was dead.

He hadn't really ever thought about it, but he was dead. By some freak twist of fate he had been trapped inside the thin veil that lay between life and death, damned to an eternal, inescapable trapeze act, leaning at times to either side but never truly falling into them.

And it was terrifying. He was glowing now, he was very faintly translucent, and though he felt his covers against him, the sensation was wrong. They hovered against his skin because he expected them to - there was a sense of not belonging in that space, not belonging in the world of the living.

He felt alive when he was a ghost, and he felt dead when he was a boy. He was immature, snobbish, and narcissistic at times, and others he was filled with an overwhelming sense of guardianship and a selfless longing to protect others. They were good feelings, but hollow ones, like a shell that contained him inside - a confused, frightened creature he was, haunted by his own existence.

He knew nothing about himself and it terrified him. Humans, they were easy - everyone subjected to public education knew how to be a human. But he wasn't a human at all, not anymore. He always felt the cold unlivingness within himself, and he knew nothing about it. He didn't know how to be a ghost. He didn't know anything.

All humans walked the earth with the knowledge of their impermanence. All humans were aware that they were bound to the ticking of the clock, and that one day, without fail, their flesh would fade to dust, their bones to ashes, and that at some point in the far, far future, so would the world.

But would he?

Was he impermanent? Could he still anticipate the soft finality of death?

As a human, like many other humans, he had feared death, feared the potential nothingness that he had assumed would eventually clutch him. But it was even more terrifying to him now not to know if he even could fear death anymore. It was a game of chance and a game of confusion - he was human, so therefore, he could expect death just as every other human did. But he was also a ghost, a spirit dislodged from mortality, and by that logic, death had already clutched him and wrung him dry. He was both and he was neither, and he had no idea what was waiting for him.

He shivered. He remembered the feeling of death. He remembered every single muscle in his body tense tightly in response to a sudden influx of electricity. He remembered choking on his own garbled screams and his own blood and feeling his skin flake off as it fried. He remembered feeling light and woozy, remembered the sudden flash of white. He remembered suddenly feeling as if the entire universe had folded up inside of him, a feeling that made him want to throw up and cough and wheeze but had constricted him and immobilized him from fleeing from it. He remembered the violent shiver of the fabric of two entire separate planes of existence weaving themselves into his flesh. He remembered passing out, thinking that surely he was dead, tumbling forwards and seeing his friends' mortified faces for the last time.

When he woke up it all felt wrong. He could feel the weight of his own flesh. He had felt as if he was lying inside some sort of body-shaped container that moved when he did. He was alive.

Only he wasn't alive. He was a ghost and he was dead.

But he was alive. He was a living human boy.

Who was also dead.

But alive.

He groaned and twisted around in his sheets. He didn't know anything. He felt alone. He had his friends and his family, but he was alone. They were all burdened with their inevitable fatality, of which he was free, and so long as that held true, they would never understand him, not fully. They feared death, or at least they anticipated it, but he... he was death. He had crossed that bridge.

In a way he supposed that he really had died. Danny Fenton had died at least - a naive, clumsy child who worried about his grades and his social status had died. In his place had appeared a different Danny Fenton, who was still a child, but who suddenly was more aware of it all, experienced far beyond his years.

He sighed and willed forth the white light to engulf him again and rip the stitches of life back open.

There was a flip side. He was happy. Terrified and uncertain of things as he was, he was happy.

A sad, directionless child had perished, and from the ashes of his fate had risen a strange creature which was confident and driven and selfless, giving up its mortal dreams to protect the dreams and lives of others.

It was strange. They were impermanent, they were mortal, and he was not, but he fought for them anyways. They were all going to die, and yet he, the dead, battled to protect them from death's hands.

He smiled to himself. Dead or alive though he might be, he cherished that impermanence. He protected it. It wasn't his to give or take - and maybe that was just the thing. He cared about it. He cared about people. Their mortality made him happy, because they cherished it too, and they made themselves alive.

He felt himself lose his grip on the waking world, yawning and humming softly to himself.

It really didn't matter what he was. It mattered what they were, and he would always protect that.

Always.


End file.
